In honor of tomorrow being Valentine's Day, we interrupt the regularly scheduled rants, raves and ridiculousness to bring you this very special love story, involving Jerry and June, and the horrible things they don't say to one another. It's purely fictional, of course, and it is meant for all you cynics who hate sappy Hallmark holidays like the one we celebrate tomorrow.
They had had all sorts of problems lately, and so the toilet getting plugged up was just enough to ruin everything.
"Did you put paper towels in here?" Jerry said. He wanted to know.
"No. No, I don't do that anymore. I won't do that again," June said.
Jerry looked at his wife. He set the plunger down and got up off the linoleum floor. "Well, someone put something down there. I know that's what you do. You clean the sink and the mirror and when you are done you flush the paper towels down the toilet. I know that's what you do."
"No. No, I don't do those kinds of things. Maybe the cat dropped something down there. Skipper! Skipper, where are you? Did kitty drop something in the toilet?"
The cat came into the kitchen, saw that she was not going to be fed, and walked out again.
"Someone had to flush the toilet," Jerry said.
"What?"
"Flush. Even if Skipper dropped something in the toilet, someone, a human, had to flush it."
"Maybe we had visitors. Was anyone over this morning?" June asked.
"No. I think you did it. Think hard. What went down the toilet?"
"Maybe you went too much. Maybe the toilet couldn't take it," June said.
"Not true," Jerry said. "I used the other toilet this morning. I watched everything go down. It was you, just tell me it was you wasn't it?"
"Maybe I did. I didn't mean to, I know better. Yes, I did. I must have dropped the paper towels in there this morning when I finished cleaning the mirror with Windex. Now I remember I did. Shit. I'm sorry."
"I see," Jerry said.
"It was an accident. Give me the plunger, I'll fix it."
"This toilet is so sensitive," Jerry said. "You know that."
"I know," June said. "That was stupid of me, all that paper towel down the toilet."
"How often do you do this? How much?"
"A lot of paper towel I guess," June said.
"Every day? Do you flush paper towels every day? How much every day?" he asked.
"I don't know."
"Tell me. What about maxi pads? I want to know everything that goes down this toilet," he said.
So she asked him to sit down at the kitchen table with her, and so he did, he sat down still holding the plunger, and then she said that she was sorry. About everything. About the toilet. And then she went on.
"The scratch on the station wagon. That's from me. It didn't get keyed. My purse zipper scraped that up," June said.
"I see," he said.
"And the pillow cases on your side of the bed are dirty. There were no clean pillow cases yesterday morning. I took the ones on your side from the hamper."
"I see."
He was looking up at her now and saw that her eyes were teary. Her hands were tightly gripping the edge of the kitchen table, so that her knuckles and fingertips were pressed and pale. For a moment, he almost wanted to touch her, lightly, on the arm.
For a moment she felt her face get hot, and the skin under her arms and on her inner thighs felt warm and damp, and she almost told him more. But she stopped herself and walked down the hall. Leaving him standing there with the plunger dangling from his left hand.
She did not tell him about her boss, Marcus Barrington, and how she had sex with him in his office after work, late one night, and then how she spent the last night, the one when Jerry went upstate to see his mother, at Marcus Barrington's apartment. And then about the other day, while Jerry was at work, Marcus Barrington and June had gone back to the house during lunch time, and they had done it right there in the shower that was right next to the broken toilet, and they had flushed a condom down the drain. No, they had flushed two of them that afternoon.
No, she did not tell him that. And because she did not tell him, Jerry went into the bathroom and shut the door. Sticking the plunger into the toilet again, he went back to work. Nothing was coming up, but he simply had to get the toilet fixed.
- You can reach Dean Bakopoulos via e-mail at deanc@umich.edu